Monday, June 30, 2008

Children of the Corn Selloff

Mr. Gaffen beat me to it (the story, not the headline, even I am not that corny).From MarketBeat:

The latest report on the corn crop was better news for the farmers and bearish for the traders of the product, but in a season filled with unseasonably harsh weather, the price of corn may remain unpredictable for months to come.

In trading Monday, December corn futures fell by 30 cents, their daily limit, in trading on the Chicago Board of Trade, after the U.S. Department of Agriculture said that farmers planted more acreage than was originally anticipated in the USDA’s planting intentions report, released in March.

Farmers planted about 7% fewer acres than last year — about 87.3 million acres — but that’s still more than the 86 million acres anticipated in March. Still, intentions don’t add up to much more than a hill of beans (or a hill of corn, as it were) if the weather remains difficult and the harvest comes out worse than currently expected....MORE